Speed and Magic.

Previously, we talked about what AMP is at a high level, but for Shopify store owners there is still a lot to understand. Let’s take a look at why AMP is important and how RocketAmp can help.

AMP - A deeper look

When a customer comes to your website, a common path for them is to search for a product and get linked to your Shopify site from that search. When they visit the page, most of what they see is optimized for desktops and then made “responsive” for mobile. Responsive means that the content and theme are reorganized for a smaller device, but not necessarily optimized. This helps the visual appeal of the site, but it can be a poor experience for the slower, less powerful network and phone experience, and it doesn’t take into account the expectation of speed from your mobile customer. AMP does.

AMP is a technology that allows specific content to come through quickly and easily. It allows your site to get to a user by removing some of the unnecessary pieces of the page that the user might not even see, while allowing the important parts to come through. This affects performance in two ways. The first is how much information is being sent to the user’s device - the less information, the faster it all gets there. The second is that the amount of time it takes for the user’s phone to show your site to your customer is also shortened. AMP does this through the use of special ‘approved’ tags that can be applied to your site. The user’s phone sees these tags and knows how to quickly put the page together for the user.

Why RocketAmp for Shopify

We created RocektAmp because the mobile shopping experience doesn’t meet the expectations of mobile shoppers. According to Google Over 50% of searches are now being done on mobile and each of those users expects web pages to load just as fast as they would on desktop (under 2 seconds) [1,5]. Unfortunately that’s not the case - according to mobile testing company, dynatrace, on average these pages take 7 seconds [2] to load causing almost 60% of users to give up and abandon your site [3]. According to Amazon, for every 100ms that it takes a webpage to load, sales decrease by 1% [4]. In other words, slow web pages are costing businesses money. RocketAmp aims to change this.

While AMP itself is a technology to make pages load faster, your website still has to get AMP integrated in order to make that technology useful for customers. To make this complicated process easy, RocketAmp is an easily setup Shopify app. RocketAmp automatically and intelligently determines what on your site can already work with AMP and sends that content, each time a page loads.

Because RocketAmp sits between your site and the user, it is extremely flexible and virtually maintenance free.

Want to add a new product? Not a problem - RocketAmp will automatically handle those pages the instant a customer looks at them.

Want to change your store theme? Not a problem - RocketAmp will still be able to make sure your site looks great on mobile. (Note, full theme integration is not yet available)

Worried about your main site breaking? RocketAmp only adds a minimal amount of code necessary to make sure that your user’s device uses your AMP optimized page.

Want to keep the important engagement functionality? RocketAmp can already handle image and social functionality like Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter. We’re constantly building out functionality to add more optimized rich media like video, as well as tracking, analytics, and more as possible.

Google has already started promoting certain sites that use AMP in their search results. Starting with news sites, sites participating in AMP receive special treatment that allow users to know the site is AMP enabled through the user of an AMP icon. Already, 90% of publishers that have adopted AMP have seen higher click through’s to their sites. While AMP hasn’t been used to change search rankings, Google has been careful about how they word their answers but has indicated that product pages are in its future [6]

Since RocketAmp is a Shopify App, it’s a simple one time setup that will make your site faster for every mobile user and work with any changes you make. Get your customers from search to browse to buy with lightning speed using RocketAmp.